Deeplinks Blog posts about Wikileaks

In the past week, the larger Internet community has joined EFF in sounding the alarm about the new copyright bill, now known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as it makes its way through the U.S. House. The bill threatens to transform copyright law, pushing Internet intermediaries—from Facebook to your ISP—to censor whole swaths of the Internet. SOPA could forever alter social networks, stifle innovation and creativity, and destroy jobs, which is why Rep.

Next week, several EFF staffers will be speaking at the first-ever Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (Rightscon) in San Francisco. The conference, organized by Access Now and sponsored by several foundations and companies, brings together some of the leading thinkers in the digital human rights space, as well as representatives of technology companies from Silicon Valley and beyond for discussions on the human rights implications of the ICT industry. The conference (tickets are still available here!) is jam-packed with excellent speakers and participants, and promises to provide new insights into solutions for the myriad problems facing Silicon Valley companies today.

“When everything is classified, then nothing is classified…The system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.” ~ Justice Stewart, New York Times v. United States, 1971.

Last week, the White House issued the so-called ‘WikiLeaks’ Executive Order, which mandates better security for the nation’s classified computer systems. While ensuring that the government has better security over its own systems is a good goal, it fails to address an equally important problem: the American government’s addiction to overclassification, which goes far beyond the appropriate and effective means necessary to safeguard real secrets.

In June, we published an article highlighting the problems with uploading sensitive documents to two Wikileaks imitators, the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) and the Wall Street Journal'sSafehouse. Apart from the well-documented security problems of both sites, we noted that their terms of use (TOU) offered whistleblowers very little protection.

On August 8, AJTU published its revised TOU, attempting to address our concerns. We've looked through the new terms and we're happy to report some good changes.

Starting next month, the vast majority of Australia’s Internet users will find their access censored, following a decision by the country’s two largest providers--Telstra and Optus--as well as two smaller ISPs (itExtreme and Webshield), to voluntarily block more than 500 websites from view.

The decision from the two ISPs comes after numerous failed attempts by the Australian government to set up a centralized filtering plan.